Customer Experience Matters

You can fool some people for some of the time, but most people can eventually tell what’s real and what’s not. This shows up in a couple of areas. First of all, employees can sense if customer experience is not really a top priority with the executive team. The second place this shows up is in marketing efforts. No matter how much money you spend on advertising, you can’t convince customers that you provide better experiences than you do.  

Here are some implications of this law:

• Don’t hide behind a 4th priority. While it’s possible to come up with a long list of priorities, there’s no way that many will get a great deal of attention. A good rule of thumb: Anything below your 3rd priority is not a priority at all. So make customer experience one of your top 3 priorities.
• Sometimes it’s better not to start. If you’re not committed to customer experience, then don’t start a major initiative; it’s a lot of hard work. And if customer experience isn’t a top priority, then the effort will likely fail. The result: Frustrated employees who are increasingly reluctant to re-engage in these types of efforts in the future.
• Advertise to reinforce, not create positioning. Since customers ultimately know how you treat them, the best you can do with marketing is to reinforce the truth. If you want to change how you are perceived, then start by treating customers better; and then use advertising to reinforce the new way that they’re being treated.

The bottom line: If you’re not committed to customer experience, you can only fool yourself.

P.S. Here’s a link to all 6 laws of customer experience.